USA Sherpa

When you want to have lunch in the town park or any national theme parks it is best to brign a salad and sandwich. You can pull out the deli meat and condiments easily straight from the cooler and just make the salads ahead of time.  All you have to do is toss a green salad mix with a bagged salad mixtures and you’re off to go.  Cutting up tomatoes, croutons, cucumber slies and some ground pper works well enough to give you a fun hassle free lunch at the park.

salads, sandwiches, tomatoes, pinic, park

One thing everyone agrees on is that beautiful Telluride knows how to party. Nestled in a remote box canyon in the San Juan Mountains toward the southern end of the Rockies, the city came into being as a mining outpost in the 1870s. A hundred years later, it turned over a new leaf as a champagne powder ski resort. Now a scenic gondola connects the ski area’s chic Mountain Village resort with the original, largely preserved Victorian town below (the whole hamlet enjoys National Landmark status), and fun rages from sunup to well after sundown, 365 days a year.

Off the slopes, visitors hike, bike, snowshoe, camp, fish, kayak, golf, ice-skate and rock-climb, depending on the season. But what really sets good-time Telluride apart from other well-heeled mountain retreats are its festivals. The town-wide party season kicks off in June with an internationally renowned balloon rally, when hundreds of the humongous contraptions take to the air at sunrise. After that, multi-day fests come fast and furious throughout summer and fall. Among the top draws: Bluegrass, Wild West, Wine, Jazz and Mushroom. By the time the world-class Telluride Film Festival pulls up stakes in September, fresh powder typically blankets the peaks. That’s the way they like it in Telluride: Every season flows seamlessly into the next, with never any doldrums between.

Hop aboard the St. Charles Avenue streetcar. It is the nation’s oldest continuously operating line for a swaying ride toward the legendary nightlife of the French Quarter. You can ride in jazz, indulgent host of Mardi Gras, capital of creole cooking and take-out margaritas — the Big Easy has been teaching the rest of America to swing ever since the original Satchmo, native son Louis Armstrong, honed his chops as a riverboat musician on the mighty Mississippi. “Let the good times roll,” natives say, a sentiment that sounds even better, sassier, in the old patois, rolling off the tongue like a Bourbon Street hurricane on a steamy summer night — “Laissez les bons temps rouler.” Part French, part Spanish, part Caribbean, shaped by African traditions, old-line gentry, and waves of Irish and Italian immigration, New Orleans serves up a cultural gumbo spiced with good music, good food and good spirits. It’s the sort of improbable place a poet would have to invent if it didn’t already exist, except no one could dream up New Orleans.

St. Charles Avenue streetcar, new orleans